From the course: Project Management Foundations: Schedules

Identify project activities - Microsoft Project Tutorial

From the course: Project Management Foundations: Schedules

Identify project activities

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- [Instructor] Everything in a project runs more smoothly when you identify all the work that needs to be done and break it down to the right level of detail. Keep in mind, that includes work performed by internal resources as well as contractors, subs, and other vendors. Identifying work starts with a work breakdown structure or WBS. You create it as part of defining your project scope. First, make a list of the project's high-level deliverables. In a WBS, deliverables are named using nouns. In our example, the high-level deliverables are published training guide and launched website. Second, look for lower-level deliverables. In our example, a few lower-level deliverables are the completed manuscript, laid out training guide, and training guide available for sale. Lowest-level deliverables are called work packages. The manuscript deliverable has several work packages. Preparation, written manuscript, captured graphics and revised manuscript. Don't forget to add in activities that aren't associated with deliverables like project management, supervision, reporting and communication. The next step is to identify the activities needed to complete each work package. This means breaking the work down into small pieces that you can estimate and manage. Activities are named using a verb-noun combination. In our example, the revised manuscript work package has two activities, review manuscript for technical accuracy and correct manuscript. In addition, give each activity an ID, like a WBS code, to make it easy to identify and associate with project documents and other information. Finally, make sure the activities are the right size. What does right size mean? It's whatever size you need to easily estimate, assign, and track work. Common rule of thumb is between eight and 80 hours. Anywhere from one to 10 workdays. For larger projects, you might size activities from 20 to 80 hours to keep your activity list from getting too long. Here are a few methods for evaluating the size of your activities. Break down activities until you can estimate time and cost with the accuracy you need. In our example, we can estimate work packages. The written manuscript is estimated at eight weeks of work so it's broken down into four activities to keep the work at 10 days or less. See if activities can be assigned to a single person or a small team. In the example, the training guide needs a graphics person for illustrations and the cover. The website deliverable could be handed off to a web team. Define activities that are shorter than your reporting period so you get timely status updates. Ensure activities have distinct beginnings and ends like being triggered by another activity or delivering something at the end. That makes it easy to track status. If an activity is too big, repeat these steps until it is the right size. For larger projects, work with a small planning team to break down the first level or two of deliverables. Then hand off sections to other teams to flesh out work packages and activities like giving the website deliverable to a web development team. Add activities from the lower level teams and external teams to your overall project. Review the final activity list with your planning team to make sure each activity is correct. If you get duplicates from a couple of teams, make sure you include the work only once. The activity list provided in the exercise files shows the deliverables and activities for the training guide project. For practice, try identifying work and breaking activities down to the right size in one of your own projects.

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